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Process & Practices

In-App Subscriptions Made Easy

There are various types of subscriptions: recurring, non-recurring, free-trial periods, various billing cycles and any possible billing variation one can imagine. But with lack of information online, you might discover that mobile subscriptions behave differently from what you expected. This article will make your life somewhat easier when addressing an in-app subscriptions implementation.

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Enterprise Architecture

EIP Designer: Bridging the Gap Between EA and Development

This article presents the EIP Designer project, an Eclipse-based tool for introducing integration patterns into an EA design, providing fluidity and continuity while filling the gap existing between EA practices and concrete software development.

Microsoft Patterns & Practices announced the availability of Enterprise Library 4.1. Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges (such as logging, validation, caching, exception handling, and many others). Application blocks are a type of guidance encapsulating Microsoft recommended development practices.

According to this post, this release builds on the May release, with emphasis on consistency, extensibility, ease of use and integration. Along with bug fixes and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 support, the enhancements include

As is evident from the announcement some of the key enhancements in the release relate to the Unity Application Block 1.2. The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection/ inversion of control (IOC) container. The Unity application block is also available as a standalone library. As noted above some of the improvements in the library are around better support for generics and arrays and performance.

We are working on the Silverlight Integration Pack. Preliminary backlog has been released and we invite you to comment on stories and vote on the ones you see the most value in to help us prioritize the backlog.

Also, we've added the roadmap page to our codeplex site, through which we intend to inform the community about our ongoing work and future plans.